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Comment by ejb999 | Hacker News Reader

I imagine it is a tiny fraction of the people getting laid off that go that route - imo, most are out applying for jobs.

I work for a fortune 50 company - (not faang), on our team we had 2 openings posted back in early November - one for a developer, one for a lead developer (same tech stack) - this was for a fully remote positions, but limited to timezones that mostly overlapped with the USA - we got 3 applicants for the lead, 4 for the non-lead positions and hired from that pool.

Mid Jan we got the OK for two more developers (also 100% remote, the same tech stack and same total comp as above), we got over 330 resumes to weed thru this time - with lots of ex-faang and other big name tech companies folks applying, whereas we never saw resumes from those companies before.

Its good for us of course, but I feel bad for anyone who needs a job quickly - there is an awful lot of competition for not as many openings

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Last summer and also before that, when I applied, I would get ~90% response rate and would have at least a call from recruiter/HM. Last week I sent a bunch of applications and crickets... this is something that I've never experienced in +10 years being in the industry. I'm not in dire need for a job but I can imagine how much,much stressful is to be unemployed now vs even 3-5 years ago.

I think you should stop sending crickets. It might annoy prospective employers.

It definitely sends the wrong message about introducing bugs rather than removing them

I was laid off in December and this has been by far the hardest search of the now four times (yes, really) I’ve been laid off in my career.

The few times I’ve received anything resembling feedback in this cycle has been along the lines of “we have a large number of highly qualified candidates for this role” and with a lot of LinkedIn postings citing 200+ applicants, I believe it.

Never apply through LinkedIn. It is so low-friction that the vast majority of applicants are nowhere near qualified, and hiring managers quickly learn to ignore anything that came in from LinkedIn.

OTOH, if you are job hunting, be sure to keep your LinkedIn profile up to date.

Thats helpful (but rare) to hear. Does anyone have any concrete anecdotes reinforcing the importance of keeping linkedin looking fresh?

Also what matters? Artful descriptions of past positions? Activity on timeline? Upvotes on skills? Links to projects?

I used to keep my linkedin fresh just to see what feelers I get. I also funnel all recruiter emails into a folder. (It's a good ego boost sometimes, not gonna lie.) Last time I was looking for a job roughly four years ago, I just opened my email recruiter folder and started responding. Responded to four emails, (three faangs plus linkedin), and now I'm at a faang.

Now, there's no way to know for sure that keeping linkedin fresh actually helps. Also it was a special time where I had just finished an online masters in CS and I was really on a roll so I was taking a bunch of MOOCs afterwards as well. IMO keeping my linkedin updated with a degree in CS and mooc certificates helped. Normal day to day stuff I wouldn't update linkedin for.

When I was reviewing resumes I would generally also look at an interesting candidate’s LinkedIn as it often provided more detail than the resume itself.

For me, I was mostly looking for more detail on a candidate’s experience. Links to projects were good. I didn’t consciously look at anything else, but I’ll admit that I probably regarded more complete profiles better.

I would also check out candidate’s personal sites. Decent content (even not up to date) was generally a big bonus.

Despite the criticism from other people in this thread, pretty much every role I've received is through LinkedIn. I probably get 4 or 5 recruiters reach out a week regarding one role or another, of which 1 of those is worth my time. That increased over time as I've built my network of recruiters in my field.

In terms of prior experience, I simply state what I achieved at each role in a bullet list. Nothing fancy. My university education is a list of all the modules I took.

Forget the "social media gamifying" side of it. Likes and posts don't matter if your goal is just getting offers. Keeping the profile current, and have your skills section up to date as recruiters use that to filter applicants. Block any recruiters that send you insultingly low-ball offers. Connect with those that provide value.

The headhunter spam helps to keep aware of who's hiring in the region, then when you will something that might seem interesting apply directly.

Although some of them are also good, and might help you to at least skip directly to the interview on site.

My last 4 roles came out of recruiters on LinkedIn reaching out.

Having detailed job descriptions with rich detail as to what you did and a good number of connections in the industry you’re looking in is what drives the algo

I got my current job in mid-2021 after a "cold" reachout from a recruiter who just happened to have a position that was perfect for me. I wasn't looking, but was open to suggestion.

My profile at that time probably hadn't been touched in about 5-6 years. After talking with her I cleaned it up a bit, but it's nothing more than a basic resume and a list of past positions going back about 10 years. IME, all they care about is that you provide enough context that they can compare against the openings they have. The "extra" skills, projects, etc., can come out when you have a pre-interview discussion.

I've been in industry 30 years and every position except my first has been through a recruiter. They're good at this (some of them anyway): make them do the hard work.

Isn't LinkedIn basically social media? I will have no part in that.

You can basically port your resume to it and do nothing else and it can get you the occasional lead on a job. 3/4 of my last jobs were from LinkedIn recruiter outreach. One of the recruiter I told I wasn't ready, and then months later I pinged them and got right into the interview process and eventually got a new job.

I never let anyone else do the company vetting for me, not even for preselection. I also want to have the leverage of negotiating with my future employer / stakeholder directly, recruiter cut including. So from my POV and with all the spam that comes with it, a LinkedIn is not only useless but a major nuisance.

Every recruiter who I connected with via LinkedIn was a salaried employee of the company fwiw. Going around them wouldn't have given me more leverage.

Maybe that changed over the years, I only remember professional recruiters. But even so, this still mostly amounts to noise as to me the majority of companies are just not interesting to work for at all. I usually target 3 to 5 (max) interesting companies / openings which I thoroughly research on beforehand myself. That approach has never failed me so far, keeps me interested and motivated to go through interviewing plus an upper hand during negotiations. YMMV of course, that's just the approach that has consistently worked for me.

Oh yeah there's definitely a lot of noise. I have a niche that is very SEO'd on LinkedIn (Haskell), so that helps. I do just ignore people inquiring about generic software jobs though. But every so often a Haskell company finds me and then I keep in touch.

please email me for haskell help if you do not mind

Counterpoint: I've been working in this industry for ~20 years by now and have deleted my LinkedIn around the halfway point. Turned out it was even more useless than that Facebook account I had axed around the same time (sadly had to go back there for access to the marketplace recently).

TL;DR don't bother with all that recruiter spam and general engagement tactics for yet another data hoarding, privacy violating "social network". If you are doing a good job and keep investing in yourself there will always be good jobs in this industry.

Build Trust and Carry On

I’ve actually found LI to be good for leads for generic companies as an alternative “resume drop” - any time the company paid to distribute the job you know they’re actively recruiting for it.

What should one do instead?

Find someone in the company that’s a second order connection and ask for a warm intro. Most companies still have a recruitment bonus for internal employees and after a short conversation most will tell you they’ll tell the internal hiring manager to look at your resume.

The higher up on the career ladder you are, the better this works and more important it is if you’re not getting in via recruiter.

I have had very similar experience to this and everything said here is 100% accurate. It is extremely taxing on my mental health. Fortunately, my hobbies have really helped.

> we have a large number of highly qualified candidates for this role” and with a lot of LinkedIn postings citing 200+ applicants, I believe it.

That doesn't mean they get 200 highly qualified candidates ;)

In my experience, before you would get 150 applicants and not a single one qualified for the job (could actually program or have any relevant experience). Now you get 3 qualified ones and 200 applicants.

I guess I don't exactly understand as my experience is quite different. I have recruiters beating down my LinkedIn and email literally every day for pretty decent jobs.

> I have recruiters beating down my LinkedIn and email literally every day for pretty decent jobs

Some companies (not many) are still recruiting, and there's now a massive amount of laid off people fighting for those jobs. Just because some recruited spammed you doesn't mean it would have been easy to get an offer...

Yeah we'll see how the market goes then.

>>I have recruiters beating down my LinkedIn and email literally every day for pretty decent jobs. reply

A few of those jobs might even really exist!

I am of the opinion that the vast majority of inquiries I get from linked in (at least 5 a week) are from scammers and brand-new or desperate recruiters just looking to collect resumes to add to their database. I pretty much ignore all linkedin inquiries at this point - it has been taken over by scammer and hucksters.

Hm you might just not have a well filled out LinkedIn, because my experience has not been like yours at all. Most of my jobs have been from LinkedIn recruiters.

Highly reminiscent of 2001 and 2008. From feast to famine.

Hindsight sucks sometimes. I was looking at my linkedin messages and I have many from FAANG recruiters reaching out back in late 2020 and early 2021, and my profile is mostly private with not a lot of detail. The current market for senior/principal software engineers is dismal. The listings are there, including remote, but it's as if there is a hiring freeze across the board yet they leave up the job postings.

Hang in there. January was really disheartening for me. Like literally dead, no replies, in a market where I'm used to just waiting for the recruiters to hit me up and pick between them. In the second half of February things are picking up a little, some leads from recruiters, some replies to my resume. I expect March to be when things really pick up as budgets for the year are approved.

It probably won't be the easy pickings, sellers market it was at least until the market has had time to absorb all these laid off engineers, but I have hope it'll be much better.

The market for junior dev is even worse, imagine being fresh out of college in a market with 100,000 freshly laid off mid-staff level engineers

That's true, however I've been seeing complaints for a little longer than that. Perhaps in FAANG they were hiring, but in general I remember seeing a lot of junior devs (not from elite colleges) commenting about how they applied for 50 positions sometimes during COVID. Something unthinkable in my time.

eh, this was life foe me in rhe eaely 2010s too. Super hard to get into a good spot back then.

The junior dev market has been terrible since the COVID lockdown.

Remote is hard to make work with juniors, unfortunately.

Tell me about it. I don't mind helping someone, but when they don't pay attention the first time and I have to have the same exact meeting again, it's kind of a bother.

We've had some success with recording meetings and using automated transcriptions, though we don't have any fresh out of college juniors now.

My current place does that, but we still don't really hire juniors so who knows if it works.

It was pretty shitty in the late 2000s/early 2010s IIRC.

Checked mine too and the difference is stark. However just setting Linkedin to "looking for a job" was enough to get a lot of attention in early February. I didn't want to wait for layoffs on my company, so, in advance, I got a much better paid job in about 2-3 weeks. Listings always suck, btw. Recruiters is where it's at.

I wonder what recruiting looks like as a career right now in comparison. I’m sure many will have to switch fields.

Depends. In Ireland, the tech recruiters will all move back into pharma. Dunno what'll happen in the US, maybe a bunch of them will do sales?

I see experienced ones remaining calm, where rank-and-file is a bit desperate: too many calls, sending me nonsense jobs, badmouthing companies, pushing it too hard to accept offers. Unsurprisingly, there was a boom during COVID, and a lot of those new people started around that time.

I see a correlation with development positions. There is just too many candidates for junior positions, but if you're a company trying to hire senior, principal or leadership your chance of success without a recruiter is very slim.

Are you looking for a new job? If so, what are you looking for? Where are you at?

I got laid off in November (not faang). I was going to wait until the right position came around, but as the lay offs kept coming in January I jumped on the first non-terrible opportunity. If the music stops I don't want to be without a chair.

good choice - you definitely don't want to be caught without a chair when the music stops.

Whether one likes musk or not, and whether or not you agree with how he is running twitter or not - he let go like 80% of the company and it is still more or less running (with some bumps) - I don't think other companies will go to quite that extreme, but I'd bank that some executives right now in some companies are asking themselves "can we at least cut 33% of the staff and still keep things (more or less) running"?

I mean, twitter’s worth about 40% of what it was when Musk bought it. Hardly a success story.

It’s not worth anything until he sells it. That’s just some imaginary number people are making up to cast aspersions at Elon Musk.

I mean, fidelity has no reason to cast false aspersions at musk especially since they own equity in several of his companies

https://www.axios.com/2023/01/29/fidelity-cuts-twitter-valua...

How are you calculating its current value, given its finances are now private and it is not traded on the open market?

Financial institutions that own significant equity in twitter still publish their valuations https://www.axios.com/2023/01/29/fidelity-cuts-twitter-valua...

Ha! Interesting. Thanks for that, I stand corrected.

I expect Twitter to be worth even less than 40% with that $8B in debt on the books.

and they are the only tech company that is down 40% or more since their high, correct?

Not the only one, but idk why people would follow Musk’s lead as opposed to, say, Tim Cook’s, when apple’s valuation has barely taken a dip.

Tesla is also making money hand over fist so following Musk makes sense. He just acquired twitter which was a money loser. Going to take time to turn it around

Excellent choice. If/when things improve you can make the switch, for now you've got steady income and a non terrible position. That's better than a lot of people.

> I imagine it is a tiny fraction of the people getting laid off that go that route - imo, most are out applying for jobs.

Speaking for myself; I'm doing both. I applied for a job, and I am also working on my own company on the side. I have some run way, and could have gone all in on my company, but this is a terrible time to be seeking investment as a founder, and it probably will get worse. What I like: job stability, and having "free"[1] time to work on slow-growth projects. I fully expect things to get worse before they get better, so the route to profitability for ambitious new startups may be tricky.

1. It's amazing how much additional time you get back when you switch from a high-pressure FAANG job to something more normal

The layoffs are rather sizeable. Even if only a small fraction go the start-up route, that could end up being a significant number of new start-ups.

It’s not mutually exclusive. Applying for jobs takes a few hours a week. Maybe a little more if you get a hit. You have a lot of bandwidth to work on an mvp and do bootstrapped startup stuff.

IDK about you, but applying, recruiting calls, company research, HM call, leetcoding, practicing system design interviews, scheduling coding/arch interviews, practicing with arch diagramming tool, telling recruiter it was good and no i still wont show my hand with comp, followups because layoffs hit recruiting and coodrinators (they're short handed now), more scheduling conflicts, interviewing, and then telling the recruiter "no you offer first, then I'll tell you what i think", "Ok I'll talk to your VP finance about how valuable you think the options are", more scheduling...

It's easily a full time job.

Its sad seeing the students coming into the field trying to find work right now. They don't understand why there's no responses or why the corps are not showing up to job events.

The industry has perpetuated the lie that stem means employment, so now we have a surplus of workers in an economic downturn, they're competing for the jobs because there is less capitol to create them.

When the market goes down the corps pull back. All the taxes we pay in infra and education are not returned by them.

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